


Shattered

by Angelicalangie



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-09
Updated: 2010-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 00:49:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angelicalangie/pseuds/Angelicalangie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the past and the future collide, the only way is out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The house was silent, and though the colours on the wall were warm and inviting, she feels chilled to the core. She picks up the photo from his bedside table, in it she wears a white shift dress and her hair was tousled, her grin was large enough to spread across her face and she was bent slightly at her waist, whilst the man in the photo had his arm around her and his hand gently holding her hip. He looked at her with gentle adoration, he wore a grey suit and his shirt collar was unbuttoned, he too wore a happy smile.

She returned the photo back to its place and stood up, he wasn't home yet and she had always hated waiting. She looked at her side of the bed in comparison to his, barren and bare, much like how she felt the relationship had become. They had married when he had been granted asylum and inevitable naturalisation. Their relationship had begun in earnest and in secret. It had been fun and filled with laughter. The base had know within months that they were together and within the year they were married.

They had lain in bed many nights and dreamed of a future where the war with the Goa'ulds no longer existed and he could begin living as a normal person. He had often laid his hand on the soft swell of her abdomen and shared his dreams of how she would nestle a baby of theirs there. She placed her hand over that spot now, and sighed, dreams always seemed to shatter in her world. She walked into hallway and down the stairs, walked into the kitchen and looked at how beautiful it looked, and felt an imposter in her home.

The door opened, he dumps the rucksack he had taken to carrying on the floor by the couch, picked up the mail she had brought in from the mailbox and flipped through the junk that seemed to increase daily. He dumped it in the paper basket, put the keys on his hook and closed the door behind him and walked through the living room into the kitchen and took his wife in his arms.

"Evening Samantha. Think we ought to call in for take out?" He kissed her behind her ear and attempted to entwine his fingers with hers. "how was your day off."

"It was fine, we need to talk Martouf." She was taking shallow breaths, that should have been his first clue that she was stressed he would believe in hindsight. She moved to the breakfast bar and stood behind it. Moving towards her he looked in her eyes, then something caught his eyes.

"Are you planning a trip Samantha?" Her packed bags sat before the kitchen door. She looked up at him seeing nothing but a puzzled expression in his eyes, but little forewarning of what was about to happen to him.

"I'm moving out Martouf. You are going to need these," she pushed the papers towards him. "I just don't think I can go on. I spend so much time these days off world, and my new post isn't even in this galaxy. There is every chance that I won't come back, the Wraith are far worse than the Goa'uld ever were. We can never survive all of this," she pauses and draws in a breath before finishing. "I'm not sure I am in love with you any more either."

Its a final death knell in the one sided conversation and Martouf looks at her slack jawed and broken hearted, tears running down his face unchecked. He can't understand how she can just walk away so quickly, how the decision is made so soon. He was mated for longer than she has lived and she is walking after a handful of years, the panic sets in, and he just can not understand, just how she can walk away from something he feels could last forever.

"I'm sorry," she says as she turns and picks up her bags, "I will reroute my mail to my new apartment, when I get it sorted. I am staying with a friend until then." She opens the door and turns her head and sees he hasn't moved, but is watching her bewildered and lost looking. She turns her head, opens her car door puts her bags in the back and gets in the front door. Tears are threatening to fall, but she refuses to allow it in front of him.

She hits the road and ten minutes later she has pulled to the side of some road she will never remember, she pulls her hands to the top of the steering wheel and rests her head as she cries. She never realised when they got together that the much as her love for him was deep, it was tinged too much with someone else's experience of it, so much so, that she could no longer stop the overwhelming familiarity, and the overwhelming claustrophobia that has set in, in her marriage, like a poison, unbidden and paralysing. It's over, she knows it, her heart and soul know it also. Yet she wishes that it were not so.﻿


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> when the only way is out for one, there is always someone left behind

He stands there in the kitchen, he hears the car move off, its engine fading into the distance, he does not move for some time. He looks at the papers in front of him and finally opens them, she wants to end all ties to him and he just can not understand what she wants any more. This morning everything had seemed to be fine, she had seemed to be in love with him. He saw the pain in her eyes, she can not really mean this.

The house goes dark and he finally moves from the kitchen and into the living room. He does not turn on the lights, but sinks down in front of the couch in its pale blue colour, that they had both chosen in the first days of their marriage. He can not sit on it, the concept is as alien to him as her leaving, so he sits on the hard floor as the pain begins to well up within him. He feels as bad as the day she told him Jolinar had died.

The days after her departure from Vorash had been so difficult, his grief for Jolinar, and Rosha so engulfing that it had concerned the whole base for months. Jacob Carter had been someone with whom he had talked with frequently in those dark times, he too had lost a mate. Most everyone had, but it was so deep for Martouf. She had been his first mating and would always be the most revered. He had not eaten then, he had barely drunk, just enough to sustain life, but he had wasted away, the grief all too consuming. And now that pain returned, stronger than he had ever thought possible.

Night turned to day, and still he did not move, unseeing eyes sought comprehension in all the times spent with Samantha. Trying to decipher why she had left. He would prefer her dead some hours, because at least it would never have been her choice, that she was still alive and no longer loving him seemed wrong, and more painful still.

The phone rang and he eyes it with eager anticipation, diving across the room he picks it up and calls her name, but it is the base wondering why he is late. He asks to speak to General Landry and they put him through. He explains what has happened and there is great sympathy in the man's voice. Samantha reported in as normal, shadows in her eyes but no other sign that such and event had happened. Martouf is granted a week personal time. Time to adjust to the situation. Martouf is grateful.

He finally picks himself up of the floor and sheds his shoes as he walks towards the stairs and the shower. It is there that he finally allows himself to cry, denying all the while that tears are falling down his face, explaining it to himself as shower water, much as it had been rain with Jolinar. He shaves and shampoos his hair, steps out and towels himself and his hair. He moves into their room, his room he interjects, she has rejected this too, and picks out his clothes.

He sits on the bed as he gets changes, and his eyes fall on their wedding photo. He had always loved having that picture beside his bed, a reminder of the best moment of his life, and one of the prettiest pictures of his Samantha that had ever been taken. He picks it up and tears fall again, splattering against the glass of the frame, he looks up to see where the leak has come from, before realising they are his tears, sprung from his eyes.

Moments turn into hours, turn into days and a week passes, still she has not called him. He feels the loss keenly, but tries to present a façade that works for him well enough to fool his heart, it doesn't but he hopes it will fool others. He picks up the rucksack he had put down a week ago, when he thought his life was still in one piece, when half of it was not living half way across town, in somebody's rented space.

He moves to his car, something he had, had to get used to learning to use, starts the ignition and drives thoughtlessly to the bass. They wave him in and he parks his car, travels to Gate Command and picks up a clipboard which announces which team is off base and which is stationed somewhere not here.

"She is off world, son." A gentle voice, tinged with sympathy announces gently. Something Martouf had never thought possible, but was constantly surprised by. He glances up in acknowledgement and the other man gently smiles in understanding.

Martouf moves off to his office, full of all the languages known to man, a few more recent discoveries and political treaties that need the work of a person not indigenous to Earth. He looks at everything, picks each article up and turns it over. He feels oddly detached from his surroundings, like they do not belong to him, and he to them any more. His heart is not in this any more and so he sits, still looking dazed and shocked and worn out by the emotions he is now feeling. He gave up so much to come here and now all he is left with is a house fit to be a mausoleum to the love he feels for her and papers on a desk, that mean little to him at this juncture.

He does not know how to survive without her. It sounds foolish to his ears as he is explaining it to Siler, but his gentle understanding is better than the clinical professionalism of the base's psychologist. He spends two weeks at lunch with him, trying to work it out, and the sadness in Siler's eyes slowly fades to concern at the lack of progression for the younger man.

Martouf moves through his days at the base as thoroughly as possible, he does his best with everything they pass to him, he gives them no quarter to worry about his work. It's him personally they are more concerned about. He has lost a lot of weight, he has shadows where he is not sleeping, Lantash comes out to play a lot more these days, and his patience is well known for being shorter than McKay's.

Martouf knows he is sinking into a deep depression over his loss of Samantha, he doesn't know what to do about the house, about divorce in general. All he knows is that everything that helped make up their physical life will be as split as their emotional life. He can't bear the thought. Each night he returns to the house hoping to see the lights on, her work things on the couch and her berating the television over some badly explained scientific process. Each night he returns to a dark, empty and quiet shell, and he thinks that maybe it is a physical expression of his inner emotions. He throws that thought away though as maudlin, before returning to it later in the night, as take out Chinese slowly congeals into a substance to be looked into as a scientific curiosity.

He goes into work one day, a month away from their fateful day. For him nothing in those intervening days has changed, his heart is still broken, and he perhaps has less understanding than he did before. He is in one of the numerous corridors that make a maze of the mountain, he is distractedly reading and when he glances up he sees her. His heart stops painfully, she too is thinner and he wants to reach out and ask if she is doing okay. She glances up from her data pad and catches him. There is concern in her eyes as he walks past, Lantash having taken over once more. She moves to try and stop him, but he is past her when she tries.﻿


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> when there is always someone left behind, perhaps the one leaving will see the damage before it is too late.

She sees him in the hallway, she sees the pain etched in his eyes and on his face, she sees the shadows like bruises that she has placed upon his face. She feels the guilt, and she feels his loss as well. She thought she was doing the right thing, but now she isn't so sure. She thought she was overwhelmed and claustrophobic, but now the open spaces she has created are too much, the nights are too long and she is too lonely. She misses their conversations, their jokes and his tenderness, she had forgotten how cold it was out here in the real world.

* * * * *

Two days after she hands him the papers she is off world, its a routine mission, but she is seeing the after effects of the Ori on this world, the effects of a plague loosed upon the few who didn't believe and those who did but were made examples of all the same. Sam has been granted alongside Cam, Daniel and Teal'c the use of one of the houses that now stand deserted by the dead. She sits down on the bed that the boys have decided should be hers, by virtue of being the smartest, though she suspects they are afraid of her temper should a good nights sleep be missed.

The bed is too soft, would be too soft were it a bed of nails. She can't believe that she has ended her relationship with Martouf. She thinks to herself that it is for the best and set her laptop and the generator up so she can work on the latest of the crazy after effects of Ori science, Adria has a lot to answer for in Samantha and Science's eyes.

Days drag on and the summer on the planet is sweltering, at midday they often find themselves in the house, having a siesta as Daniel calls it. It is too hot to move, let alone think Samantha can't work and some days it is hard to breath. Evenings come as a welcome relief and Samantha continues her work, making slow but steady progress, she has more than the working theory stage to occupy her mind, at least until something goes wrong with the power cables one early afternoon. She makes the decision that she should get to know the villagers. She looks at the calendar she carried with her and realises she has been planet-side for two weeks and she hasn't really seen much of the planet herself.

She goes for a walk through the golden fields that surround the village where they are staying and comes across a tree in the middle, the heat is energy sapping and the shade the tree provides is refreshing. Sitting down she allows her mind to wander back to Earth, back to what she next has to do in her separation from Martouf. She doesn't understand how her relationship has gone from something that was so beautiful and precious to her, to something she felt she needed to escape. How everything ended up so broken.

She thinks of Martouf, how her world had ended up surrounding him, how they were content one moment and the next she wanted more out of her life. Her mind kept replaying the image of him, little boy lost, little boy rejected and stunned and scared. She couldn't understand how she could wound him the way she did and yet she had. The events her actions swirled in her head until she fell asleep in the shade of a tree.

She awoke to find herself gently prodded by one of the villagers, a woman whose eyes were sad, she had seen that look a few times, she had lost someone. She smiled up at her and motioned for her to join her, smiling the villager acquiesced. The spend a few moments in companionable silence before conversation begins flowing they talk of their lives and the villager tells her of her husband. As Samantha listens she remembers how much she loves Martouf in much the same way. When the villager finishes, Samantha begins talking of Martouf.

"And is your husband one of the men you have travelled here with?" It is an innocent question, one with the implied answer of yes amongst these women.

"No they are my friends. My husband is on my planet." Samantha says, thinking of the last time they saw each other.

"Is he ill? You look sad when talking of him." It is a logical question considering what these people have been through.

"No. We are no longer together as a couple." It is the first time she has told anyone of this, the first time she has said it aloud, and she wonders why she has not mentioned it to her team.

"Why, does he no longer love you. Was he a bad husband, did he treat you badly? Do you not love him?" Her questions bely how innocent this world Samantha thinks for a moment.

"He still loves me, he was never a bad husband, he never did a wrong thing to me, never hurt me in any way," she pauses and a lump comes to her throat as she realises something she has not even contemplated. "I still love him."

"Then why are you not with him?" It's a simple question and at first Samantha thinks there are only complex answers to simple questions.

"We have a past, a shared one, he has a symbiote similar to the Goa'uld, but different in enough ways for it not to be a concern. I had one too, it turned out to be his mate before me, she died, she died protecting me. When I met my husband I was the one to tell him. I still had her memories though, and it too a long time to sort through them. Now though, it still comes up, the familiarity is through another's eyes and it makes me feel crowded."

The village women looked at her thoughtfully. "Did you never tell him of these feelings?" Samantha looked a the younger woman.

"No, I didn't think he could do anything to help me."

"I felt overwhelmed in the early days of being married to my husband. I told him. I felt better, sometimes keeping things in makes them bigger than they already are." She stands and looks at Samantha. "It is easier to give up on something and cause suffering all around, but it is more rewarding to keep going and talk to the other person and work through your problems." The village woman walks away and leaves Samantha to her thoughts.

The sun goes down and the heat of the day begins to dissipate, Samantha walks back to the village, she smiles at the boys, and settles down at the cables to the generator, as she is working, she is thinking about her relationship. She misses Martouf, she misses his presence and she still thinks of him as hers. She doesn't think that will ever change either. She thinks on what Arlya the village woman she had spoken to about her husband, their relationship was the same, minus all of the baggage, Arlya missed her husband, and thinking on the worst that could happen to Martouf made Samantha feel like screaming, thinking of him moving on was worse.

The following week and a half are filled with tests, collation of data,understanding data, retesting and as Cam has said to Samantha towards the end it had become a case of lather, rinse and repeat. Finally as the last days of the mission end and the success of the mission was announced Samantha began to feel her anticipation levels rise within her. She didn't know if they could work things out now she had hurt him so chronically. Having Spoken to Arlya she realised one thing, if she didn't try to sort out this mess she had created she would regret it all the more.

Walking through the gate she feels the heady emotion of homecoming, General Landry smiles at them and the announce the unqualified success they have managed to pull of once more and he congratulates them as the walk down the ramp announcing that they have an hour before they have debriefing. Dropping off her packs, she quickly showers, dries her hair, has a quick check over with the good Doctor and runs off to the debriefing.

Three hours pass, for Samantha it is an eternity, she has already looked at the rota. He isn't on the base and she doesn't feel ready to go back to their home, she doesn't feel particularly welcome. She walks to the quarters they have on base instead, opens the door and she can he has been here, he hasn't been staying her, but he has brought her home comforts, he must have known she would be coming today. There is a basket of toiletries and sundry other things. She sits on the edge of the bed and smiles, there is a card, but it is just signed with his name.

She looks around the room at the place she could consider home until she has a new apartment if it all goes wrong, when she talks to him, suddenly the world feels as though it has dropped a couple of degrees, the shadows look that much darker and all her mind brigs up to comfort her is the thought of his arms wrapped around her body, nuzzling her hair before planting a kiss to her crown. It is so poignant and potent that she can almost smell his scent, feel the rise of his chest as he breathes and hear his heart through his chest. Her stomach rumbling at her wakes her from her reverie and the chill of loneliness penetrates even harder.

That night she goes to bed in the small single bed that is outfitted in the room, she stares at the clock on the bedside table for an hour before getting up. She goes over to a drawer and opens it, inside is her lingerie, such as it is for the military. Underneath all the scraps of fabric she finds the videotape. She closes the drawer and slots the tape in the player, turning on the television as she does it. She watches their wedding and begins smiling as the memories rush over her. She finds half way through that she wants his arms around her, wants him to be kissing her neck. She finds that she is missing him, and it has been building for the past two weeks.

She goes back to bed, turning it all off as she does, she feels galvanised to action, she needs a good nights sleep, and prays that it isn't as difficult as it was on the planet. Her head hits the pillow and whilst she is out like a light all she can do is sleep restlessly, tossing and turning, sighing and moaning. Seven fitful hours pass by and the alarm finally rouses her from bed. She stands and dresses quickly, she runs a brush through her hair and enters the mess. Quickly she eats her breakfast and bumps into Daniel who talks animatedly about something he has spent all night reading again. She gets up and he follows her.

They enter the hallway and stops at the turning to their offices, She turns her attention to Daniel and his conversing, only just realising he has turned from conversing about absolutely anything that at the moment she isn't interested in, but to a decidedly more personal topic, he is talking about Sha're, and how it is the anniversary of her death, and for a change this year he isn't going to be maudlin, that for him there is a change. Samantha smiles at Daniel gently, she is glad he has made that change, though she has also noticed him looking at the new doctor appreciably, perhaps she ought to warn him that she is also General Landry's daughter. Mentally she shakes her head, let him have a little hope, for however long it may last.

It is then that she sees him in the hallway, she sees the pain etched in his eyes and on his face, she sees the shadows like bruises that she has placed upon his face. She feels the guilt, and she feels his loss as well. She thought she was doing the right thing, but now she isn't so sure. She thought she was overwhelmed and claustrophobic, but now the open spaces she has created are too much, the nights are too long and she is too lonely. She misses their conversations, their jokes and his tenderness, she had forgotten how cold it was out here in the real world.﻿


End file.
